Arizona Daily Star: Trash that passes for discourse

Be sure to pick up the Daily Star to read trash that passes for discourse.

Arizona Daily Star Jan 11 2011:

The immediate reaction of some has been to point to the poisonous atmosphere that has engulfed Arizona and the nation.

Gun imagery, talk of “targeting” elected officials and taking out political opponents have become pervasive. The bitter 2010 election turned up the volume. Demonizing people who have different opinions makes for easy media punditry and cheap entertainment.

It needs to stop. Trafficking in violent imagery and treating any person, whether an elected official or someone who supports a particular cause, as objects makes them almost an abstract. It’s too easy to hate an abstract.

Whether or not the gunman was motivated by a particular political ideology or pumped up by the trash that passes for discourse is, in the most fundamental way, immaterial.

And it’s not the reason to stop the pervasive and corrosive rhetoric. The reason is so much simpler – the demonizing is tearing apart our country from within. When we see each other as the enemy, we cannot rise above and come together for the greater good.

It shouldn’t take a massacre for us to talk to each other instead of only about each other.